NASET News Alert

More Sleep Means More Focused, Emotionally Stable Kids

October 22, 2012

How important is sleep for children? Getting too little could leave them more emotional and impulsive. As a nation, we don't get enough sleep. And we're passing along our night-owl habits to members of the next generation, which could leave them with less control over their emotions and more prone to impulsivity, according to the latest study. Lead author Reut Gruber, a psychologist at McGill University, and her colleagues describe in the journal Pediatrics a study in which they either added or deprived healthy children ages 7 to 11 of one hour of sleep a night over five nights. Their goal, says Gruber, was to see if such modest changes in the amount of sleep children get could affect their behavior. The children's teachers were asked to fill out a 10-item standard questionnaire to assess the children's attention, impulsivity, irritability and emotional reactivity at the end of the study period. To read more, click here